High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Lost Planet DX10 benchmark

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frozen world highlights high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight as DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and it still runs slower than the DX9 version.

We use the in-game performance test from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the creatures act a little differently each time you run it, requiring multiple runs. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously by the performance test and blend into each other.

Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in-game including 4xAA/16xAF.  First at 1920×1200 resolution with the HD 4870-X2:

Now at 1920×1200 with the GTX 280:

And now at 1680×1050 with our HD 4870-X2:

And finally the GTX 280 at 1680×1050:

Here we see that clock speed is crucial with Lost Planet with both of our video cards.  Perhaps the Athlon II 250 X2 lag a little behind the Phenom II and Penryn architecture, but there is no real difference with any combination of hardware that we used at either resolution.